Putting the fun
back in to Blackjack!

A sound piece of advice I picked up from a very wise man when I was kid was: “Don’t keep playing the same game. You’ll soon run out of luck.”

Now I’ve tried to keep that little pearl of wisdom in the back of my mind whenever I’ve felt the urge to go a little crazy and overstay my welcome with Lady Luck. So it was with a heavy heart and a wallet not as heavy as I feel it could have been that I switched from blackjack to roulette just after Christmas.

Roulette is a completely different animal to blackjack, but it’s one that deserves to be loved all the same. There’s a little bit more luck to roulette. Not quite as strategic as the cards. You can’t control your own destiny as much, nor run from it. That little ball makes all the rules; it’s no card you can decide to dispose.

The game I play, Low Stake Roulette, is as simple as they come. I don’t ask too many questions of the Gods when I place my bets. In return I get no answers. That’s how I like it with the games I don’t know. That’s how they like it with me.

In a strange little way it feels like cheating on a loved one when I switch games. The wife notices a change in me – as if I’m coming home late all of a sudden or smelling of perfume. It’s strange how my demeanour changes, and I hope my luck doesn’t follow.

I reckon I keep spinning the wheel for two weeks. Say hello to the New Year as a roulette player, then make my excuses and leave. I’d like to return home to Mother Blackjack, but it depends on how my luck runs. That’s always the way.

Now some of you might find this post a little strange, but I believe the true blackjack fiends out there will know exactly where I’m coming from with this: sometimes the most important thing a player can have is a good table.

I don’t mean one of those crazy luxury things that are all plastic you can buy that’s made to look like the real thing. They’re too futuristic for my liking! I’m talking a big, thick solid oak table that’ll take the weight of just about anything. Now that’s a table…

It might sound as if I’m talking specific about offline blackjack in this post, but not at all. I think even when playing online it is important to recreate that blackjack feeling as much as you possibly can. Now if that means buying a big table to put your computer on then so be it. Your environment changes your mindset and the way you play, so it’s good to set yourself up in a comfortable manner.

Last week, for example. Usually I play on my lap in the living room, if only to keep my wife company. Well, as the colder nights drew in she began to head upstairs to bed a little earlier, leaving me all alone with just the computer. I decided to see if my luck would change with my environment, and started playing on my huge dining room table. Guess what? My luck changed.

So I now have my own little blackjack headquarters ready for whenever I want to play. If I’m being honest, I’m playing less, because I have to ‘feel’ it when I want to have a good, but the results when I do play are great. I think all you need in life is a kitchen table, the periodic table, and a good old sturdy blackjack table!

It’s strange how the mind works, when you think about it. I mean, sometimes as a 70-year-old man perhaps I should be expected to forget things every now and then. My wife’s name for example, often escapes me, and it drives her batty! I’ve known her for over 50 years! The rules for online blackjack, however, I could never forget. Just don’t tell her that!

This week I was looking through some old photos, and I came across one of myself and Malorie in the 1970s. Now the 1970s was a strange decade when it came to clothes and furniture, yet when it came to playing cards nothing was different. Of course, we didn’t have computers to plug into the internet and play online blackjack (it’s a good job I didn’t have my arthritis in the 70s otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to be Master Dealer!), nor was there so much regulation around gambling.

What we did have, however, was a chocolate fondue machine! We used to waste hours messing about with that thing trying to set it up and, when we finally got it working, it was a bit of a letdown! Much like the optics in the living room, where Mal would put her booze. I wonder what happened to those optics?

Our living room is a lot less flashy now. We still have everything we need; we still have pictures and the television and a radio for when we just want to relax. It’s the computer that’s the obvious big change, and what a revolution it’s been! Some of our friends won’t touch them but I think they’re just splendid! I wonder where all that information comes from? There are some very clever people in the world today – but not all of them are blackjack experts!